Jan van Kessel the Elder

Look closely at a Jan van Kessel picture and you often have to lean in: many are no bigger than a hand, painted on copper, whose surface holds a hard, almost enamel-like shine. On it he laid out insects, shells and flowers with a naturalist's patience, each beetle and butterfly spaced across a pale ground as if pinned in a collector's cabinet.

He came by that eye honestly. His grandfather was Jan Brueghel the Elder, the Antwerp master of tiny, jewelled detail, and his uncle was David Teniers the Younger, a painter of peasant scenes. Van Kessel joined the Antwerp painters' guild in 1645 and built a career on this small, exacting work, in a city that traded in luxury goods for collectors across Europe.

His most ambitious project stretched that curiosity across the whole known world. In a series called The Four Parts of the World he gave each continent its own panel crowded with animals, people and curiosities, ringed by dozens of little scenes, a painted version of the cabinets of wonders that wealthy Europeans were assembling in the 17th century. On the Europe panel, dated 1664, he tucked his own signature into a picture hanging on the painted wall.